The Base Determines The Superstructure

In the closing months of the twentieth century, a song called “Livin’ La Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin climbed to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart and stayed there for five weeks. The track’s mainstream success was hailed as a significant commercial breakthrough for Latin music, and indeed, it certainly was followed by several English-language crossover hits by other established Spanish-language artists like Shakira and Marc Anthony. For a time, it seemed like the biggest names in the growing Latin music industry were being given the opportunity to transcend it.

Though the Latin explosion was extremely visible and highly discussed back then, the ongoing difficulties that contemporary artists continue to have getting songs with Spanish or Portuguese lyrics played on American radio stations receive comparatively less attention. By most metrics, the Puerto Rican rapper and reggaetonero Bad Bunny was the biggest artist of last year. He had the biggest album, the biggest tour, and the biggest streaming presence. On radio, however, he was a complete non-entity. More than two decades after Ricky Martin’s crossover moment, Spanish-language hits like “Despacito” and “Mi Gente” are still only ever permitted to receive airplay when amended by English-language verses from artists that the hyper-consolidated American radio landscape is already comfortable with.

“Livin’ La Vida Loca” itself was written by Desmond Child, a veteran arena rock hitmaker known for penning successful crossover efforts like “Dude (Looks Like A Lady)” by Aerosmith and “You Give Love a Bad Name” by Bon Jovi. His team cited the Pulp Fiction soundtrack and the music of Frank Sinatra, who had passed away not long before sessions began, as their primary musical influences. The song’s mixing engineer Charles Dye even acknowledged in an interview that he was asked to “tone down” some of the “Latin elements” in the production by Martin’s label. “There are some songs on [the album] that wear their Latin nature on their sleeve,” he said. “But that’s not really the case with ‘La Vida.’ It’s designed to move Ricky into the mainstream.” The song’s runaway success, then, was less a breakthrough for Latin music than an opportunity for a handful of Latin artists to make conventional pop hits. Whatever doors it opened did not seem to stay that way for long.

It was the late nineties, after all: the undisputed zenith of the CD era and, by some metrics, the