If you can walk outside of your house without hearing "Despacito" at least one time, consider yourself lucky. The Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee track hasn't stopped playing since the remix featuring Justin Bieber was released back in April, officially making it 2017's "song of the summer."
More than that, though, the track is effectively demonstrating the pervasive nature of cultural appropriation in the pop music industry.
Since its emergence onto the charts, the awfully infectious tune has remained the No. 1 single for 12 weeks straight — the first song to do so since Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk" in 2015. And now, "Despacito" — which translates to '"slowly" — has become the most-streamed song of all time, beating out Bieber's hit single "Sorry." To put that in perspective, the song is the first Spanish-speaking track to top the charts since Los Del Río's infamous "Macarena," back in 1996.
However, the song's success has not come without complications — some of which can be attributed to Bieber's propensity for acting impetuously.
On three separate occasions since the track was released, Bieber made it clear he didn't know the words to the song he asked to be featured on. In May, a video of the Canadian pop star drunkenly singing "Despacito" surfaced — on which he replaced the lyrics with words like "burrito" and "dorito."
Later that month, Bieber swapped the original lyrics for a more expressive line during an Instagram live story: "na ba da ba da ba da ba da ba de bo." And just one month later, the Biebs proved — yet again — his inability to respect the culture that practically gave him his latest hit single. In June, he refused to perform the song during Sweden's Summerburst Festival, explaining to fans he "can't do 'Despacito' because I don't even know it."
It is important to note the issue does not lie in his inability to speak Spanish fluently. The trouble arises in his continued disregard for the importance of the song's success to the Latino music industry as a whole, which is made most apparent through his imitations of the track.
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