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.
The Latin pop explosion of 1999 was a fake thing that became real. It was a marketing strategy that worked well enough to evolve into a cultural phenomenon. 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’s a web of different sounds — some connected to one another, some not — that really only have a language in common. The Latinx artists who blew up and made hits in 1999 came from vastly different places and circumstances. Most of them were just making straight-up English-language pop music with occasional nods to the performers’ different heritages. But a lot of those stars did have one big thing in common: They were signed to the various different subsidiaries of Sony Music.
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. Mottola found ways to push his artists, using their ethnicities as a marketing hook. 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. Thalía’s only Hot 100 hit, the 2003 Fat Joe collab “I Want You,” peaked at #22.)
For Mottola’s strategy to pay off, he needed to open things up with the right performer and the right song. He had both. Ricky Martin had everything a record-label exec could possibly want. He had an intriguing backstory, and his boy-band past was especially attractive during the high boy-band era. Martin was talented, hard-working, and insanely good-looking. His acting career made him a familiar face in America, and his music had already made him a star around the world. A big-deal Grammy performance early in 1999 gained Martin a tremendous industry buzz. Martin also had “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” a goofy, eager-to-please earworm too immediate to be denied. Empires are built on songs like that.
There’s a whole lot of right-place/right-time in Ricky Martin’s story, but there’s also a ton of hard work. Few performers have been quite so driven to the spotlight, and few have soaked up quite so much attention without letting it drive them insane. Enrique Martín Morales grew up comfortably middle-class in San Juan. (When Martin was born, the #1 song in America was Sly & The Family Stone’s “Family Affair.”) Before Martin was 10, he was already starring in Puerto Rican TV commercials.
As a kid, Ricky Martin loved English-language arena rock, and he also loved the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, a strange institution first founded in 1977. The producer Edgardo Díaz had an idea: He would collect a bunch of adorable kids, and he would keep that lineup of kids forever unstable. Menudo membership was always temporary. In a Logan’s Run twist, the members of Menudo would be asked to leave when they turned 16 or 17. This kept any of them from becoming famous enough to take control from Díaz, and it also made boy-band membership oddly attainable. Menudo were hugely popular around the Spanish-speaking world, but a good-looking Puerto Rican kid could become a member of the group. That’s what Ricky Martin did.
Ricky Martin auditioned for Menudo a few times, and he got shot down for being too short, but he finally got to join the group in 1984, when he was 12. As a member of Menudo, Martin had to work tirelessly, pretty much forgoing his adolescent years. But Martin also got to…
Read More: Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca”