Selena and Tainy return, and a new partner appears…

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Harlan Talib Ockey: All right, let’s get this out of the way: when Selena Gomez says “I don’t understand much”, is she referring solely to “that accent you have”, or is she replying to Rauw Alejandro’s line, “I don’t know if you speak much Spanish”? Is she claiming she doesn’t speak Spanish… in perfect Spanish? Is this a joke about Revelación being Gomez’s first major Spanish-language release? If so, it doesn’t land; this is going to be cited in “funny lyrics” threads forever. Actually, this issue is essentially emblematic of “Baila Conmigo” as a whole. There’s a great deal worth praising here, but when you look too closely at it, it starts to unravel. First, the good: Gomez sounds newly electrified, and Rauw Alejandro is adept in his role as the slightly too-sincere love interest. Tainy’s production cleverly stitches together pop and reggaeton signifiers by switching up his favorite trick of kicking the beat to life upon switching to a different vocalist; the palm-muted guitar acts as an additional pulse, creating multiple tiers of percussion through the first verse before we finally reach the reggaeton drums. However, “Baila Conmigo” frays by constantly contradicting itself. For a song about dancing together, our protagonists spend almost no time singing together. (Are social distancing references played out?) We never get to see their allegedly spectacular chemistry in action, apart from during the final chorus, which immediately de-escalates after a single iteration. If your passion really is that powerful, prove it. This should be the core of the song, and yet once you peel back the surface, it disintegrates.
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Austin Nguyen: The premise of “Baila Conmigo” has already been partially done as a High School Musical: The Musical: The Series scene, but even if Alejandro and Gomez’s dance were as instinctual and sensuous as they make it out to be, that reggaeton beat isn’t a pulse; it’s a plod.
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Thomas Inskeep: Gomez doing reggaeton works better than it should, and Alejandro sounds sweet singing. The song’s slow grind is smart. Too much Auto-Tune for my taste, but what else is new in 2021? 
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Katherine St Asaph: Conjuring a spell, comparatively speaking, is easy. Harder is to  abruptly pull a listener out — a percussion squall, the first few  seconds of a funk breakdown, the production equivalents of a sudden  finger snap — they back in just as they’ve registered it as a thrill.
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John Seroff: I’m a die-hard Gomez fan but this is my first exposure to Alejandro, who acquits himself fairly well on a sweet and slight summer ballad that grew on me over repeat listens. The accompanying kinda-sorta post-apocalyptic video imagines a world where young, fashionable and rail-thin working-class lovers learn Tik Tok dances to seduce one another on the beach in courtship spectacles fit for Attenborough narration. As fantasies go, few feel so eager to be sponsored.
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Rodrigo Pasta: What is there to come from this? A golden medal, a stripe that says “Nothing like a piece of firework pie for dinner”? It’s uncanny. Selena Gomez made a song — the best of the year — in which she is merely a participant, another object in which the song doesn’t focus on for very long. From the very first line, Rauw Alejandro is already clocking her — “Baby, I don’t know if you speak Spanish very well,” in an all-Spanish song, and it’s dislocating. From then on, her contributions come in tiny bursts of energy, like the dislocating way in which she sings the word “baila” (BAila, BAila, BAila) like a croaking dissected frog, or the staring-at-the-wall blankness of “pegate, ven a mi.” Meanwhile, the song, courtesy of master Tainy and his enormous team, is being stalked, curated, a sharp knife into the blistering sun. Eyes being shut and then opened to reveal a dark red-colored void. And Rauw is the executioner. We’ve always known he was a beast, but here, he’s squeezing the sound and bending it as if he were entering a body without opening it. His glee, particularly when talking of her “curiosity,” is turned pitch black when the implications aren’t reassured. But it’s all in the ending, the last 20 seconds. A brief glimpse into the sky, as, without realizing, a drill enters your body and cuts it halfway through. Those final words — “dimelo TainyY…” — as your skull is being cut wide open, the most powerful and emblematic closer to a song since the Beatles’ very own “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” back in ’63. Except, this time, there’s no proto-hippie joy, only the giving up everything that was once good. Terrific, yet terrifying.
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