FEATURE:
Groovelines
Ricky Martin - Livin' la Vida Loca
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THERE is a starting point and inspiration…
behind me writing about Ricky Martin’s Livin’ la Vida Loca. Apparently, on 11th July, 1999, the song hit number one in the U.K. It may be a throwaway song for many people. Quite odd for people young now who never heard it in the 1990s. There is no doubting how important it is in pushing Latin artists to the forefront. The likes of Jennifer Lopez (her debut album, On the 6, was released in June 1999) swiftly followed and broke through. On 11th July, 1999, Ricky Martin became the first Puerto Rican artist to top the U.K. chart with this Pop classic. Livin’ la Vida Loca reached number one in twenty nations, including the U.S. One of the biggest songs of the 1990s, Livin’ la Vida Loca was also crucial in helping Latin music cross over to the mainstream. There are a couple of features I want to bring in that take us inside the song. What it means and the impact it had on the wider music culture. I will end with an interview with Ricky Martin from 2011 where he discussed the impact and importance of his best-known song. First, American Songwriter wrote about Livin’ la Vida Loca for a feature earlier this year:
“When the Latin pop music explosion took hold in America starting in 1999, former Menudo singer Ricky Martin was at the forefront of the movement. He had released four Spanish language albums prior and had sold out stadiums throughout Mexico and South America. His Grammy Awards performance of “La Copa De La Vida” (“The Cup Of Life”) in February 1999 was this country’s introduction to a man who would soon crossover into the English language market and become a superstar in his own right.
Finding The Right Hit
Sony Music executives already knew they had a star on their hands, and this was a well-planned Grammy introduction to Martin as the debut single from his first English language album was arriving a month later in March 1999. Draco “Robi” Rosa (who had worked with Ricky Martin before and sung with Menudo) and Desmond Child (hit writer for Bon Jovi and KISS) were brought in to craft “Livin’ La Vida Loca” which featured big brass sounds and a twangy guitar melody. The duo wanted to come up with “The Millennium Party Song from Hell,” and they helped create an international sensation that kicked off the 2000s Latin pop craze. (They co-wrote other songs for the album as well.)
“The mandate was, you know, I had [to write] pop with some authenticity,” Rosa told NPR in 2021. “Push to be honest, push to be as real as possible. But make sure it’s pop. That it’s, you know, commercially — that there’s a potential. … I was channeling [Jim] Morrison. I mean, there’s elements of big band [and] a little bit of surf guitar.”]
In 2012, Child, who is half-Cuban, told Songfacts, “His [Martin’s] manager, Angelo Medina, thought there was a market in radio stations that were doing songs that were going back and forth between English and Spanish. He said, ‘Well, what if you do one song that’s kind of both?’ If you look at ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca,’ there really is very little Spanish in it. But when we presented it to the record company, one of the top executives came back to me and said, ‘Could you write that song in English now?’ I said, ‘It is in English.’ And in fact, when the first ads came out, he insisted that underneath ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca,’ in parentheses, it said, ‘Livin’ the Crazy Life.’ We were scratching our heads, like, Come on now, anyone who has ever gone to Pollo Loco knows what the word ‘loco’ is.
“That particular song had parts that sound like Spanish but aren’t. Like, ‘skin the color of mocha.’ ‘Mocha’ is an American term – we don’t say that in Spanish. But it sounded like Spanish. It took three days to work out the right combination of sounds and words. That’s pretty much the longest I had ever worked on a song before. That was before I started working in theater. These days it takes me three or four days to write a proper song.”
A Global Smash and Lasting Impact
“Livin’ La Vida Loca” broke big across all borders. It went No. 1 in America, Canada, the UK, Mexico, and 13 other countries, and it went Top 10 in over 15 more. Global sales of the single surpassed 4 million units. Ricky Martin’s self-titled, English language debut, which also featured two songs written by Diane Warren, would spawn two more hits and go on to sell 7 million copies by January 2000. Martin had arrived in a big way.
In the wake of Martin’s success, other artists like Shakira, Enrique Iglesias, Marc Antony, and Jennifer Lopez also joined the chart-topping party. It was something new and refreshing, and it was a boost to Latin pop music worldwide. Since the 1980s the two big Latin crossovers had been Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine as well as Selena, but now the market had expanded considerably. There are those who would contend that the Latin pop trend then was nothing more than a marketing gimmick, but it did expose mainstream listeners to artists they might not have paid attention to before.
Today, “Livin’ La Vida Loca” has racked up a half billion views on YouTube and nearly 400 million plays on Spotify. The video features a ballroom full of sexy Latin dancers and an exuberant, hip-swiveling performance from Martin. It’s easy to see why his star rose so quickly”.
I am going to move to a large feature. One that dives into Livin’ la Vida Loca. A real framing of its creation. What was happening to Rickly Martin at the time. The impact of his smash hit. We have just past through Pride Month. Ricky Martin, as a gay man, was writing about heterosexual relations through most of his career. It must have been quite strange and tough for him to project this image that was seen as more acceptable and commercial. Not really able to come out in the 1990s and write more honestly. Rather than tainting Livin’ la Vida Loca, it is an observation. The song is not really about his lust and attraction. It is more about this entrancing and slightly ominous woman who lures you in and then leaves you reeling. A situation that many men might have been led into. Anyway, for their The Number Ones feature, Stereogum gave Livin’ la Vida Loca an 8/10 score:
“The Latin pop explosion of 1999 was a fake thing that became real. It was a marketing strategy that worked well enough to evolve into a cultural phenomenon. To even talk about it, you need to get a few things out of the way right out front, like the fact that “Latin music” is not a genre. It’s a web of different sounds — some connected to one another, some not — that really only have a language in common. The Latinx artists who blew up and made hits in 1999 came from vastly different places and circumstances. Most of them were just making straight-up English-language pop music with occasional nods to the performers’ different heritages. But a lot of those stars did have one big thing in common: They were signed to the various different subsidiaries of Sony Music.
Tommy Mottola, a man who’s appeared in a bunch of these columns because of his marriage to Mariah Carey, is an Italian baby boomer from the Bronx, but if there’s any one figure most responsible for that boom, it’s him. Mottola found ways to push his artists, using their ethnicities as a marketing hook. A few years after the big boom year, Mottola admitted as much to Billboard: “There never really was a Latin explosion, but we used it to take gigantic advantage of it, and lots of our stars benefited from that.” (In 2000, while that whole boom was still happening, Mottola, by then divorced from Mariah, married another one of the artists he’d signed, the Mexican singer Thalía. Thalía’s only Hot 100 hit, the 2003 Fat Joe collab “I Want You,” peaked at #22.)
For Mottola’s strategy to pay off, he needed to open things up with the right performer and the right song. He had both. Ricky Martin had everything a record-label exec could possibly want. He had an intriguing backstory, and his boy-band past was especially attractive during the high boy-band era. Martin was talented, hard-working, and insanely good-looking. His acting career made him a familiar face in America, and his music had already made him a star around the world. A big-deal Grammy performance early in 1999 gained Martin a tremendous industry buzz. Martin also had “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” a goofy, eager-to-please earworm too immediate to be denied. Empires are built on songs like that.
There’s a whole lot of right-place/right-time in Ricky Martin’s story, but there’s also a ton of hard work. Few performers have been quite so driven to the spotlight, and few have soaked up quite so much attention without letting it drive them insane. Enrique Martín Morales grew up comfortably middle-class in San Juan. (When Martin was born, the #1 song in America was Sly & The Family Stone’s “Family Affair.”) Before Martin was 10, he was already starring in Puerto Rican TV commercials.
As a kid, Ricky Martin loved English-language arena rock, and he also loved the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, a strange institution first founded in 1977. The producer Edgardo Díaz had an idea: He would collect a bunch of adorable kids, and he would keep that lineup of kids forever unstable. Menudo membership was always temporary. In a Logan’s Run twist, the members of Menudo would be asked to leave when they turned 16 or 17. This kept any of them from becoming famous enough to take control from Díaz, and it also made boy-band membership oddly attainable. Menudo were hugely popular around the Spanish-speaking world, but a good-looking Puerto Rican kid could become a member of the group. That’s what Ricky Martin did.
Ricky Martin auditioned for Menudo a few times, and he got shot down for being too short, but he finally got to join the group in 1984, when he was 12. As a member of Menudo, Martin had to work tirelessly, pretty much forgoing his adolescent years. But Martin also got to travel and perform in front of vast audiences. Martin was a part of Menudo when the group released the 1985 English-language single “Hold Me,” which became their only Hot 100 hit, peaking at #62.
In grand Menudo tradition, Ricky Martin left the group at 17, and he moved to New York to study at NYU. Before classes even started, though, Martin dropped out. He was offered a role in a stage musical in Mexico City, and he took it. From there, he spent the next few years acting in telenovelas. While in Mexico, Martin started off his solo recording career, releasing a self-titled Spanish album. His first solo single, the 1991 ballad “Fuego Contra Fuego,” reached #3 on Billboard‘s Latin chart.
In 1994, after he’d released a couple of albums, Martin landed a guest-role on the short-lived NBC sitcom Getting By. From there, he was cast as a singing bartender on General Hospital. Martin kept that gig for about a year, but he didn’t like it much, so he went back into music. On his 1995 album A Medio Vivir, Martin moved away from sentimental balladry and into percussive dance jams, and that choice proved hugely successful. The album took off in places that didn’t typically go for Spanish-language music, like France and the UK. In America, A Medio Vivir went gold, and the banger “Maria” became the first Ricky Martin song to crack the Hot 100, where it peaked at #88.
Funny thing about “Livin’ La Vida Loca”: It’s not really a Latin pop song at all. It doesn’t come from any Latin tradition. Other than the title, the song doesn’t even involve the Spanish language. Desmond Child, who co-wrote the song with Ricky Martin’s old friend Robi Rosa, later told Songfacts that the two of them worked hard to give the song a flavor that might seem Spanish to people who had no experience with any kind of Spanish culture: “That particular song had parts that sound like Spanish but aren’t. Like, ‘skin the color of mocha.’ ‘Mocha’ is an American term — we don’t say that in Spanish. But it sounded like Spanish.” (One clueless label exec still asked Child if he could write a version of the song in English.)
But while those lyrics don’t make much use of the Spanish language, they do go pretty hard on Latin stereotypes. Ricky Martin crows about a temptress who intoxicate you to the point where you don’t even notice that she’s ruining your life. This image of the girl who will make you take your clothes off and go dancing in the rain has everything to do with fucked-up ideas about delirious passion that Americans love to ascribe to people from neighboring countries, though maybe it’s notable that the woman playing the role in the “Livin’ La Vida Loca” video was a Croatian model.
Musically, “Livin’ La Vida Loca” sounds awfully close to the big, bright, sunny ska-punk that was all over alt-rock radio in the late ’90s. The busy horn-stabs work as constant adrenaline-shots, and the baritone guitar owes something to instrumental surf-rock. The mix is jammed full of elements, these digital layers of sound that are almost overwhelming in their grandeur. (“Livin’ La Vida Loca,” it turns out, was the first #1 hit to be entirely recorded on ProTools.) One of the only moments where things get even remotely quiet — the bit about waking up in New York City in a funky cheap motel — is pure Warped Tour ska. (I wonder if New York City still has any funky cheap motels. Probably not.)
In Fred Bronson’s Billboard Book Of Number 1 Hits, Desmond Child says that “Livin’ La Vida Loca” is his attempt to channel the spirits of a couple of the 20th century’s most grandly glitzy entertainers: “We hired Randy Cantor to be our arranger and coaxed him to throwing in the kitchen sink. We added everything from whistles to gongs and horns and rock guitar and Spanish piano. At the time, Frank Sinatra had just passed away, so we were listening to Frank and swing. And I had this inspiration because Ricky reminded me of a Latin Elvis. So I had this vision of Ricky dressed like Elvis in a Las Vegas performance in all black, really moving and shaking.” This makes sense. “Livin’ La Vida Loca” is a song desperate to grab your attention, to entertain. That impulse isn’t native to any one particular culture. If it’s anything, it’s just plain ol’ American.
A song as wild and energetic as “Livin’ La Vida Loca” demands a singer who can really sell it, and Ricky Martin is up to the job. Martin’s enthusiasm is genuine and infectious. He never gets much of a chance to sing on the song. Instead, he just belts everything with a hammy flair that’s just perfect. In his overcharged gusto, Martin evokes no less a Vegas showman than Tom Jones. Even Martin’s ad-libs add to the atmosphere; every “come aaaown!” pushes the track that much harder. As the song reaches its climax, Martin is just whooping and bellowing and roaring, and it’s awesome. “Livin’ La Vida Loca” became so big that its canned enthusiasm came to seem a little oppressive, but when it hit at the right moment, it was glorious.
For the “Livin’ La Vida Loca” video, Ricky Martin worked with Wayne Isham, the guy who’d established the visual language of ’80s glam metal in his clips for Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi. The “Vida Loca” video tweaks and updates that language, but it’s mostly the same — going for pure energy overcharge, just like the song. The video’s first shot is a car screeching around a corner and decimating a fire hydrant, and Isham smash-cuts from there into a club full of ridiculously hot dancers. The rest of the clip is a riot of bodies moving and cameras whirling. At the center of it all, Ricky Martin radiates the plastic handsomeness of a Ken doll, but he’s right in there, jumping around with the same enthusiasm as everyone else while bringing enough presence to hold the spectacle together. You couldn’t resist this guy, and you couldn’t resist this song, either.
Ricky Martin’s self-titled English-language album was a huge success. It sold seven million copies in the US alone, and it kicked open the door for the Latin pop explosion that Tommy Mottola envisioned, as we’ll see in this column in the days ahead. But Ricky Martin hasn’t been back in the top 10 of the Hot 100 since “She’s All I Ever Had.” Many of Martin’s later singles seemed like attempts to recapture the lightning of “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” The delightfully goofy “Shake Your Bon-Bon,” another single from the self-titled album, peaked at #22, while “She Bangs,” the lead single from Martin’s 2000 follow-up Sound Loaded, landed just outside the top 10, getting to #12. These days, too many of us sadly remember “She Bangs” as the William Hung song.
Sound Loaded was nowhere near as big as Ricky Martin, but it still went double platinum. While he was out promoting that album, Martin danced with George W. Bush at Bush’s 2001 inauguration, a moment that Jon Stewart memorably clowned on The Daily Show. (Since then, Martin has campaigned for every Democratic presidential candidate from Obama on.) After Sound Loaded, Martin largely went back to singing in Spanish, which made his presence on the American charts a whole lot more sparse but which probably helped keep his star bright around the world. Martin has kept recording ever since, and he’s done some acting, too — in Evita on Broadway, on The Assassination Of Gianni Versace on FX. For many years, Martin refused to answer persistent questions about his sexuality, but he came out as gay in 2010, and he got married in 2017.
Ricky Martin remains hugely important as an inspiration to future generations of Latin pop artists. That’s how he made his most recent appearance on the Hot 100. The reggaeton star Wisin collaborated with Martin and with Jennifer Lopez, an artist who will appear in this column very soon, on “Adrenalina,” a clubby 2014 single that peaked at #94. (Wisin’s highest-charting single as lead artist, the 2017 Ozuna collab “Escapate Conmigo,” peaked at #63.) Martin has also worked with Bad Bunny, quite possibly the biggest artist in the world right now, and he’ll spend this fall on a co-headlining arena tour with Enrique Iglesias, another artist who will soon appear in this column.
In 1999, the hype surrounding Ricky Martin was deafening. “Livin’ La Vida Loca” was a single that lived up to that hype, one that very nearly translated all that manufactured excitement into tangible musical form. That kind of hype can totally derail a career. Fortunately, Martin never seemed to worry too much about keeping that high going. Instead, Martin has maintained relevance without desperately chasing it. We probably won’t see Ricky Martin in this column again, but he seems like he’s doing great these days, even as his life has presumably gotten significantly less crazy”.
I am going to end with an interview from 2011. Life definitely changed radically for Ricky Martin in 1999. Ending the decade with a massive chart success, it would have been a hit-spinning and mad time. In the interview, Martin explained how Livin’ la Vida Loca has this fun sound. Fusing horns, Latin rhythms and Pop sensibilities, it is a fun and insatiable cut. One that stands up to this day. A radio staple that is impossible to dismiss:
“Since waking up in New York City "in a funky cheap hotel" back in '99, Puerto Rican-born Ricky Martin - or Enrique Martin Morales to his mates - has kept the Latin-pop fever alive for over 15 years with countless international chart-toppers to his name. Bringing together all of his hip-shaking hits for the first time for a UK audience, we caught up with Ricky to chat about his upcoming one-off show in London and what he plans to do next.
What can we expect from your UK show in July?
"It's a very international show musically speaking - it's influenced by every culture. It is provocative and it's erotic, but very beautifully done. Giogio Armani has been a very important part of the tour and he's not going to put his name to something that is not well done. It's very theatrical. It's deep, profound and it'll make you think."
What has the reaction been like from the crowds so far?
"It's like they're rediscovering me. I'm even rediscovering me! I'm still the same entertainer with the same passion and the same hunger for an audience to have a good time. It's a really cool frequency between the audience and the stage right now - the audience really want to be a part of the show."
Have you re-swizzled any of your hits for the show?
"There are some songs that must not be touched because the audience really appreciates hearing them the way they were born. I just want to discover and rediscover a sound - it's not changing a melody, it would be just trying a new arrangement. 'Livin' la Vida Loca' has gone from heavy hardcore rock to being exclusively influenced by ska and it's been urban as well! Right now it's back to the beginning."
Why do you think 'Livin' la Vida Loca' was a worldwide hit?
"Well, musically speaking it's rich. It has a fantastic fusion of cultures from rock to ska to Latin, with the horns. During my sabbatical I spent two years not listening to my songs at all. Then one day I walked into my studio and I just pressed play and 'Livin la Vida Loca' came on and I was like, 'What the f**k is up with this track?' - I don't want to sound arrogant, but I thought, 'This is perfect'. The multi-cultural influence, the harmonies, the story - it's a really fun track. The timing of it all was really good too - Latin sounds at the turn of the year 2000 were of the moment. The cosmos was manifesting in a very powerful way for that track to be a success."
When working on new music do you strive for another 'Livin' la Vida Loca'?
"Oh man, that is too painful! Yeah, of course you jump into that mode every once and while, but you can't get too caught up with it because you start to limit yourself. My goal is to think of nothing when I'm writing a song because too many influences could sabotage a potentially amazing song. When I'm working I think, 'If something like that comes, fantastic - hopefully something better will show up - but most importantly let's just do music in the moment when the keys and the melodies are blending”.
I was just leaving high school when Livin’ la Vida Loca hit the top of the U.K. chart. It was a great year for Pop music. 1999 was full of interesting and innovative sounds. Some really great breakthroughs. You had everyone from Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears. These legendary artists making their first big steps. A song that, twenty-five years ago, was critical in ensuring that Latin artists broke into the mainstream, you have to commend Ricky Martin. All these years later, it is impossible to shake the allure of the track. Still sounding so fresh and colourful. A worldwide chart success, I think that it thoroughly deserved…
ALL of its plaudits.