Wisin & Yandel ft. Jennifer Lopez – Follow the Leader
Acapulco!
[Video][Website]
[5.00]
Brad Shoup: Self-proclaimed Los Lideres recruit Lopez, gambling that her presence in the video justifies her audible exertion on the track. (Or her converting “ignite” into a phrasal verb.) Speaking of which, I guess I still haven’t warmed to Wisin’s ever-present shoutiness. All I wanna do is hear that accordion toss out riffs.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: Leave it to the most popular duo in reggaetón, shouty rapper Wisin and electro crooner Yandel, to finally bring out the best in J. Lo, after a year of depressing collaborations with Pitbull and so forth mostly failed to achieve anything worth returning to. Not only does the clipped, kuduro-inflected beat force dancefloor movement, but López herself sounds freer and happier than she has in years, unleashing a belt that hearkens back to the glory days of “Waiting for Tonight.” I understand, economically, why she wants to keep aiming for the brass ring of U.S. chart pop, but she’s almost always at her best in Spanish.
[8]
Iain Mew: Wisin’s verse starts at 1:20 and lasts for 27 seconds. Yandel gets even less time later on. Whatever the order of the names suggests, between them they get no more mic time than Pitbull on “Dance Again”. Which is annoying, at least in Wisin’s case, because his verse leaps out as exciting and unpredictable in way that nothing else in “Follow the Leader” does.
[4]
Alex Ostroff: Technically, this is Wisin & Yandel. (And for the precious few seconds they get the mic, they make the track.) Practically, it’s another competent post-comeback J.Lo single, with just enough syncopation and olé olés to code as self-consciously “exotic.” Maybe it’s cynical of me to think so about a guest feature on an actual reggaeton single, but this still feels more calculated than Shakira’s recent detours into bilingual merengue ft. Pitbull & co. Perhaps it’s just that Lopez’s voice, thin and breathy, works best overtop of pillowy production or submerged in shimmering dance noises. You need a strong personality and some throatiness to leave your mark on beats like these, and while J.Lo has many talents, dominating tracks has never numbered among them. Unfortunately, “bubbly” and “frothy” are out of fashion these days.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Can one be an A-list star by re-entrenching into an ethnic market that you had left a decade before because you were too small, and does the internationalizing of American popular culture go both ways? Is this the equivalent of premiering The Avengers or Battleship in international markets before moving to domestic, or is that a racist question to ask? Would it be equally racist to want Shakira to sing this, and to find J. Lo mostly a little bland?
[4]
Katherine St Asaph: This is a market play, yes, but it’s mainly a Lopez showcase, as evidenced by everything: its video, a track-length advertisement for J. Lo’s hotness; the fact that if you type “follow the leader” into YouTube, you get multiple variations of Jennifer Lopez’s nicknames with only two mentioning Wisin & Yandel; an American Idol finale coming-out party where if either Wisin or Yandel was mentioned, I missed it. If you don’t like Lopez’s voice, I can’t imagine you’d possibly like this, but it basically succeeds as the dance banger she wants so fervently it’s her only remaining songwriting topic. W&Y make the most of the couple bars they get; the groove is genial. There are other J. Lo singles far more worth your hate.
[6]
Ramzi Awn: J. Lo does a fine job of working It-instrument accordion and selling this largely escapable beat. I wouldn’t hesitate to put this on at a house party, and the chorus actually kind of bangs in its practically goofy precision. I believe J. Lo when she says that when she’s on the floor, her hips are in charge. And as occasionally innocuous as Latin electropop can be, it’s about time we met “On The Floor”‘s zanier cool older sister.
[7]
Alfred Soto: She can do better than refried Miami Sound Machine (and MSM were funkier and edgier than this), but she has done worse.
[3]
It’s not racist to find J. Lo bland, but I think the condescendingly dismissal of Latin pop as a sort of minor league to which one gets busted when one can’t hack it in the big time, in the language that Real People speak, instead of a valid pop universe in its own right with its own maps and constellations, might be.
Apologies for the mixed metaphors; phone screeds are hard to keep straight.
It’s funny, Jonathan – you say “she’s almost always at her best in Spanish” – and maybe that’s the problem for me? Even here, she’s still singing mostly in English and (incidentally, like Shakira at times) I think Jennifer has different tones and registers and styles in English vs. Spanish, and there might not be enough Spanish in her performance for me to dig into it.
In the same way that there are songs Shakira was meant to sing in English and songs that she was meant to sing in Spanish and the English Rabiosa will always sound hurried and awkward in comparison to the assertive, seductive original, etc.
That went badly, I of course view Latin pop as a valid world of its own, i am wondering about audience reaction