La Bomb: The Latin Pop Explosion

▪ 2000

       Hispanics were on their way to becoming the largest ethnic minority in the United States by the first decades of the 21st century, but their music was already tops in 1999. The year saw a proliferation of Top 40 hits by Latino artists in 1999 and an explosion of Latin pop music. At the forefront were handsome, charismatic Ricky Martin—a 27-year-old Puerto Rican, the movement's answer to the young Elvis Presley—and sultry Jennifer Lopez, a 29-year-old Nuyorican (New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent) who first gained fame as a film actress. By midsummer Martin's “Livin' la Vida Loca” and Lopez's “If You Had My Love” both had reached number one in the charts. Suddenly the singers were everywhere—and not only in the Hispanic neighborhoods—their voices bleeding from Walkman headphones, their faces on the covers of Rolling Stone and Time, their well-toned bodies in heavy rotation on MTV.

      That dancing was at the heart of their performances was no surprise, not only because of the seductive rhythms of Latin music. Before starring in the film biography of Selena, the ill-fated Tejano pop sensation, Lopez was a dancer on television's In Living Color; by age 12 Martin had joined Menudo, the teenage song-and-dance franchise. He later acted on American television's General Hospital and in Les Miserables on Broadway before embarking on a Spanish-language singing career that made him an international star. His galvanic performance at the 1999 Grammy Awards was the watershed event of the Latin pop explosion, its “crossover” moment.

      The notion of Latin music crossing over was not new, however. Since the 1930s, Latino musicians had flirted with mainstream acceptance in the U.S., beginning with the “king of rhumba,” Xavier Cugat. In the late 1940s, New Yorkers flocked to dance halls to hear Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri. In 1959 Ritchie Valens had a Spanish-language rock-and-roll hit with “La Bamba,” and in the 1960s the group Santana infused its propulsive rock with Latin rhythms. Those rhythms were also pivotal to hits by non-Latinos, notably Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's work with the Drifters in the early '60s and the Philadelphia soul of writer-producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Cuban-born Gloria Estefan broke through with a string of Latin-flavoured pop hits, Spaniard Julio Iglesias became an international star, and Panamanian salsa singer Ruben Blades and Los Angeles's roots rockers Los Lobos became critics' darlings.

      None of these inroads, however, was as deep as the latest wave of Latin pop—which also included Nuyorican Marc Anthony; Julio Iglesias's son Enrique; Selena's widower, Chris Perez; and Colombian singer Shakira. Some critics noted that Martin's and Lopez's platinum hits were less than pure Latin music and much indebted to rock and rhythm-and-blues styles. Yet modern Latin popular music was a hybrid that drew on a variety of cultures and styles, from tango to Tejano ballads, Afro-Cuban polyrhythms to Brazilian bossa nova. Moreover, Martin and Lopez were careful not to ignore their Hispanic audience or the rapidly expanding Spanish-language radio market.

      Fans of world music also celebrated the resurgence of tropicalia, the eclectic, protest-oriented Brazilian music of the 1960s, and the 1999 release of The Buena Vista Social Club—Wim Wenders's documentary film about the aging pre-Revolutionary Cuban musicians who, with American Ry Cooder (see Biographies (Cooder, Ry )), caused a sensation with their 1997 Grammy Award–winning album.

Jeff Wallenfeldt

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