A Confession: Hay un muro entre tu y yo

I have a terrible confession to make. This confession will probably make IP regret that he moved in with me, will make him mentally take back the ring that he was eventually to give me, make him retreat from the idea of moving to Colorado and possibly having cute chipmunk-cheeked, smart ass babies with me.

Cue deep sigh. I was once an Enrique Iglesias fan.

Yes, yes, know: terrible. My sister, wise as she is, has always despised Iglesias’ music; my brothers had always had the wonderful sense to make fun of him. IP hates him with the passion of a thousand burning suns because Iglesias is married to Anna Kournikova (hehe . . . serves you right for suggesting we name our possible future daughter “Anna”). But prior to his crossover debut, Iglesias was tolerable, charming even. From “Experiencia religiosa” to the start of his crossover attempts with “Bailamos,” Iglesias wasn’t too terrible. A lot of sugary, cheesy love songs, yes, over-enunciation to be sure, sometimes too many syllables where there were no syllables, but relatively harmless. Sometimes a college-aged woman surrounded by college-aged male doofuses needs some music to fill in for the pathetic “romantic” gestures of the men who surround her. After all, some Michigan grad students are too busy at boring MSA meetings to wander up to Oxford to rescue said woebegone woman. Sigh. Ahem. Anyway, Iglesias’ best album – and his last Spanish-language album before the crossover – Cosas del amor saw him tempering a lot of the annoying tendencies that I had noticed in his previous two albums, but it seems like he reverted to his old style when transitioning to English. Then we had Enrique. Then Escape. And the love, it just flew out the window right around the time that IP showed up in my life. So I had no problem agreeing with him that Iglesias’ music was far from good.

However. Iglesias has released a new album of number one Spanish-language hits. While wandering about on iTunes (and checking out a playlist that contained 80s tunes that you could supposedly run to – but seriously, you cannot run to “Addicted to Love” ), I saw the new album and I have to admit I’m kind of torn. I mean, I don’t want that damn Ping Pong song, but I wouldn’t mind having Cosas del amor again. Having Vivir and Enrique Iglesias again wouldn’t be objectionable either – I still kind of like the peppy “Lluvia cae” and I’m actually quite fond of his interpretation of “Inventame” (though the Marco Antonio Solis original is pretty damn good and should be purchased). I haven’t heard Quizas, which is his latest (and quite old, looking at the date) Spanish-language album, but he does a mariachi version of a song on that album. Okay, even if I decide to buy his stuff once more, I can at least say this with certainty: boy ain’t no mariachi singer.

And trust me, I will definitely not be buying the crap that is Escape, the album which contains “No apagues la luz,” wherein Iglesias or his crack songwriters couldn’t think of a single-syllable word to use as the chorus began so they used “So no apagues la luz” (see: “Don’t Turn Off the Lights” which says, you guessed it, “So don’t turn off the lights”). How about the word “pues”, geniuses? The album has the atrociously titled songs “She Be the One” (That’s be dinner!) and “Love 4 Fun”; the title song of course destroyed IP’s dream of being a kept tennis husband (not that she ever won anything of importance). And the fact that “Hero” became associated with 9/11 just spooks me – I understand that people, countries included, set their tragedies and triumphs to a soundtrack, but a song that begins “Would you dance / if I asked you to dance” really has nothing to do with what happened. And that Chevy used the song and the tragedy to sell trucks? Yuck. The overall suckage of this album is monumental.

. . .

Aww, fuck it. I’m sticking to buying music from Groupo Bronco next time I decide to contribute to Steve Jobs’ coffers. Better songs, better singers, brings back memories of being a preteen in Mexico. To quote one of Group Bronco’s hit songs and to wash my hands of ever having written this, I sing: “Que no quede huella / que no y que no / que no quede huella . . .”