Ricky Martin crows about a temptress who intoxicate you to the point where you don’t even notice that she’s ruining your life. But it sounded like Spanish.” (One clueless label exec still asked Child if he could write a version of the song in English.)īut while those lyrics don’t make much use of the Spanish language, they do go pretty hard on Latin stereotypes. Like, ‘skin the color of mocha.’ ‘Mocha’ is an American term - we don’t say that in Spanish. Desmond Child, who co-wrote the song with Ricky Martin’s old friend Robi Rosa, later told Songfacts that the two of them worked hard to give the song a flavor that might seem Spanish to people who had no experience with any kind of Spanish culture: “That particular song had parts that sound like Spanish but aren’t. Other than the title, the song doesn’t even involve the Spanish language. It doesn’t come from any Latin tradition. It didn’t miss.įunny thing about “Livin’ La Vida Loca”: It’s not really a Latin pop song at all. One month after Grammy night, “Livin’ La Vida Loca” came out. He had energy and charisma and a gift for spectacle. He was also a Broadway star and a soap-opera actor and a very big deal on a global level. Ricky Martin looked and moved like a boy-band guy because he was a boy-band guy. (People actually watched the Grammys back then.) You can practically see the audience figure things out. That Grammy-night performance was the moment that Ricky Martin really clicked for the music business and maybe also for the rest of America. Martin also had “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” a goofy, eager-to-please earworm too immediate to be denied. A big-deal Grammy performance early in 1999 gained Martin a tremendous industry buzz. His acting career made him a familiar face in America, and his music had already made him a star around the world. Martin was talented, hard-working, and insanely good-looking. He had an intriguing backstory, and his boy-band past was especially attractive during the high boy-band era. Ricky Martin had everything a record-label exec could possibly want. Thalía’s only Hot 100 hit, the 2003 Fat Joe collab “I Want You,” peaked at #22.)įor Mottola’s strategy to pay off, he needed to open things up with the right performer and the right song. A few years after the big boom year, Mottola admitted as much to Billboard: “There never really was a Latin explosion, but we used it to take gigantic advantage of it, and lots of our stars benefited from that.” (In 2000, while that whole boom was still happening, Mottola, by then divorced from Mariah, married another one of the artists he’d signed, the Mexican singer Thalía. Mottola found ways to push his artists, using their ethnicities as a marketing hook. Tommy Mottola, a man who’s appeared in a bunch of these columns because of his marriage to Mariah Carey, is an Italian baby boomer from the Bronx, but if there’s any one figure most responsible for that boom, it’s him. But a lot of those stars did have one big thing in common: They were signed to the various different subsidiaries of Sony Music. Most of them were just making straight-up English-language pop music with occasional nods to the performers’ different heritages. The Latinx artists who blew up and made hits in 1999 came from vastly different places and circumstances. It’s a web of different sounds - some connected to one another, some not - that really only have a language in common.
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To even talk about it, you need to get a few things out of the way right out front, like the fact that “Latin music” is not a genre. It was a marketing strategy that worked well enough to evolve into a cultural phenomenon.
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The Latin pop explosion of 1999 was a fake thing that became real.
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In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.