2000 Spanish Music Hits

[Brayan Jacobsen]

The need for sad music during moments of emotional turmoil is a common phenomenon in humans. In fact, several psychological studies center around the branch of music therapy, suggesting that people find pleasure in the act of listening to sad music. A combination of factors exist to promote this pleasurable reaction to sadness, such as:

Reik was one of the leading Spanish pop groups during the 2000s. So you can understand how excited people were when it was announced that Reik was going to collaborate with one of the newest and most popular Spanish pop bands today: Morat.

In my opinion, Morat is an amazing group. As a fan, I love their cool attitude, how down-to-earth they appear to be, and how humble they present themselves. And honestly, they alone are responsible for a good number of current sad Spanish songs.

Y si se apaga la luna, y si se van las estrellas
Y si se calla la msica que me invent por ella
Tal vez se acabe esta noche, tal vez se borren sus huellas
Tal vez termine esta historia de una bestia sin su bella que me obliga a no dejarte
Y no me deja olvidarte, y no me deja olvidarte

Por eso esperaba con la carita empapada
A que llegaras con rosas, con mil rosas para m
Porque ya sabes que me encantan esas cosas
Que no importa si es muy tonto, soy as
Y an me parece mentira que se escape mi vida
Imaginando que vuelves a pasarte por aqu
Donde los viernes cada tarde, como siempre
La esperanza dice quieta, hoy quizs s

Why has music become so intentionally awful during the past two decades? What changed between the end of the 20th century (i.e., the 1990s, which in my opinion was the last great decade for music) and the beginning of the 21st century?

Spotify has been accused repeatedly of failing to compensate artists fairly. Bands such as The Black Keys, Radiohead and Talking Heads have all criticized the service for underpaying artists, especially independent musicians.

Wonderful article. Why has music become so intentionally awful during the past two decades? What changed between the end of the 20th century (i.e., the 1990s, which in my opinion was the last great decade for music) and the beginning of the 21st century? The short answer is why everything that used to have a modicum of quality now in the toilet: a monopoly on the music industry. Billionaires have shit taste in music.

Cultural decline is ugly and there is no cure. Our 21 st century is fraught with mayhem and decline from mass shootings to environmental collapse to pandemics to bad music. We as a civilization (or barbarism) are in steady decline and the final outcome is extinction.

Before you blame Napster for ruining the music industry, bare in mind that a lot of people listened to the radio because they had no other choice if they were moving around. Portable TVs and video players stopped sucking balls at about the same time as Napster came along, so people started exploring other avenues than just listening to music while they travel, watching a DVD on a laptop was really becoming practical at the same time and is a much nicer way to pass the time than listening to the few CDs you could afford over and over again. Music was facing competition and losing almost every time in the portable entertainment game.

Jesus Christ. First off, this comment section is full of a bunch of filthy entitlement and music elitism that it almost makes me want to throw up. So let me break down some of the main important points. While the research in there seems to point out statistical changes in different songs from the eras, the main goal of the article is that it wants to prove that modern music is bad, but there are plenty of the things the researchers are doing horrifically wrong here. Let me break it down.

Instantly overnight, Disney began determining our musical tastes; it was no longer about having a great sound or inspiring people, but rather appealing to strange appetites like sex with an image of wholesomeness. While these tricks had been employed by various artists throughout the last century, it was never to this extent.

Anyone with half a brain of critical reasoning could see that music had no longer become about sound, but rather about Internet sensations, popularity, narratives (often artificially generated by teams of executives and paid-for, rather than generated naturally through public opinion), image, sex appeal, shock value, and dance.

The 2000s were terrible, though, except for a few songs here and there and some niche genres or bands. The latter half of the 1990s were rigidly devoured by corporations, cleverly claiming they were not puppeteering to the extent that they were.

This corporate structure has expanded too; almost all mainstream musicians today are now funded by the very kids who were too blind to recognize how Disney was brainwashing them (and it happened; I was one of the lucky ones). Other mainstream musicians are selling their souls to corporations who are working hand-in-hand with Disney, or are just as evil. The options have dwindled.

The reason people were so keen on Napster was because they could finally get their own back on an industry that ripped them off for decades, in turn record companies used piracy as an excuse to up their own share of the profits while taking away money from artists and especially music industry professionals like audio engineers and studio technicians.

In the third part of our series exploring crossover in pop music, we reexamine the so-called "Latin explosion" of the '90s: what it was supposed to be for audiences across the U.S., and what it actually came to represent. Blake Cale for NPR hide caption

1999 was a big year at the Grammy Awards. Lauryn Hill won five Grammys, including for album of the year. Celene Dion won record of the year. Shania Twain and Alanis Morissette won multiple awards. Even Aerosmith performed "I Don't Want To Miss a Thing" from the Armageddon film soundtrack. It was a perfect '90s time capsule.

"He was an artist that would sell out stadiums throughout South America and Mexico," says Leila Cobo, vice president at Billboard and author of Decoding Despacito: An Oral History of Latin Music. "But outside of the Spanish-speaking world, people really didn't know him."

After that performance, they said, "Oh my God, this was such a hit. We need a similar song. We need something like this, something that's kind of up-tempo, kind of universal." And they went into this mad rush to find the song and they wrote "Livin' La Vida Loca." And it was all about, how do we put a little bit of a Latin flair [in it]? In a song that's in English, what kind of title do we give it that's Latin, but that everyone is going to understand, even if it's in English. How do we make it Latin without being too Latin, right? Because we want it to be a global hit. There were all these little considerations, and I think they struck just the right tone, and it's having the right song and the right artist ... because if anyone else had sung it, I don't know that it would have worked.

Cobo: I think it's fair to say that without Tommy [Mottola], it wouldn't have been this huge. I don't know that I would use the term the "father" of the Latin Explosion, but I would say that without him, it would not have had this impact. He was the president of the biggest record label in the world, and he put all the resources behind this music and he really advocated for it and he pushed it globally. And you need that push, especially back then. When you needed radio, when you needed key television shows, or else nothing would have happened. I mean, now you have streaming, but back then you didn't.

Cobo: [In the early 2000s,] it winds down. It was so frustrating. ... Suddenly, music started to go digital, here in the States. But in Latin America, that never happened, because Latin America had a million issues. It was really hard to download music legally. We didn't have an iTunes store. People didn't have credit cards to download massively. So this whole kind of digital moment, we lost it in Latin America, and as a result, all the record labels lost tons of money. There was rampant piracy. People were downloading music for free. And so the industry was very decimated in Latin America. And what this does at the end of the day is, it affects talent development in Latin America, which is the big breeding ground for this music that eventually becomes so big.

Mota: Latin isn't a genre. That's part of that education that people constantly, especially Latinos, have to work on in these spaces. ... Because that's where some of the disconnect is.

There's a lot of people that create alternative rock. There's people that do rap en espaol, R&B en espaol. When we talk about R&B en espaol, it's had such a hard time finding a space because systematically it was really hard to categorize.

This episode was adapted for the web by Anjuli Sastry. It was produced for broadcast by Andrea Gutierrez, Anjuli Sastry and Liam McBain. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Engineering support came from Leo del Aguila, Peter Ellena, Kwesi Lee and Neil Tevault. Research assistance came from Nicolette Khan, Candice Vo Kortkamp and Barclay Walsh. Special thanks Daoud Tyler-Ameen and Jacob Ganz from NPR Music, and to Felix Contreras and Anamaria Sayre of the Alt.Latino podcast. You can follow us on Twitter @NPRItsBeenAMin and email us at samsa...@npr.org.

Shakira is a Colombian musician who achieved success in both Spanish- and English-speaking markets. By the early 2000s she had become one of the most successful Latin American recording artists in the world. Her full name is Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll.

In 2011 Shakira and Gerard Piqu made their relationship public. Piqu is a Spanish professional footballer (soccer player) who plays center-back for FC Barcelona. They have two children: Sasha Piqu Mebarak and Milan Piqu Mebarak. They are not married.

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