In January, when Luis Fonsi, a veteran Latin pop musician, released "Despacito," featuring his fellow-Puerto Rican, the rapper Daddy Yankee, he could not have known how many lives it would live. Fonsi's version—mid-tempo, relaxed, ripe, and physical—glided to the top of the Latin Billboard charts. Since then, "Despacito"—meaning "slowly," referring to the ideal speed with which one should act on club-time sexual attraction—has been remixed several times, first by Fonsi himself, who courted the modern troubadour Victor Manuelle to help him translate the track's reggaeton into straightforward salsa. The remix factory Major Lazer inserted an outlandish bass drop on its interpretation. The third take on the song, "Despacito Remix," which features Fonsi singing alongside the Canadian post-adolescent Justin Bieber, diverges least from the original and yet has become a cultural rarity: now in its third week at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, it's the first primarily Spanish-language song to have summited the chart since "Macarena," in 1996.
On the original track, which is entirely in Spanish, Fonsi expertly smoldered, bidding a beautiful woman to join him (slowly) on some humid dance floor. Daddy Yankee offered his signature bawdiness, making Fonsi's elaborate sexual metaphors plain. On the remix, Bieber sings the first verse, written for him by Fonsi, in English: "The way you nibble on my ear, the only words I wanna hear." This Bieber sounds confident, adult, sultry—older than the boy we've seen recklessly navigate the wild freedoms of extreme fame (getting arrested multiple times, for instance, and posting on Instagram about his use of coloring books as a tool for managing his inability to sit still). When he joins Fonsi in Spanish, one has to admire the effort, even if his accent is a bit wooden. (Recently, at the New York City club 1 OAK, he forgot the Spanish lyrics altogether, explaining, rather boorishly, when he came to the chorus, "I don't know the words, so I say Dorito.")
The rise of "Despacito Remix" doesn't challenge any assumptions about how Latin songs cross over into the American music mainstream. "Macarena," too, crowned the Billboard 100 only once a version that incorporated English was released; artists like Juanes, Marc Anthony, and Shakira have successfully negotiated such bilingual territory for decades. But it's worth remembering that it was Bieber (or Bieber's people) who approached Fonsi about the collaboration, not the other way around. Since he was a shag-haired teen-ager crooning on YouTube, Bieber has fashioned a mystique around his effective mimicry of black and brown stylistic swagger. For Fonsi, "Despacito Remix" will likely be the commercial apex of a career that began when Bieber was four years old. For the twenty-three-year-old Bieber, singing in Spanish about grown-up flirtation, is a canny strategy to telegraph the maturity he seems so desperate to attain—just as long as he can remember the lyrics.
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