Wednesday 18 March 2009

Los Lobos 'La Bamba'

Chart Peak: 1 (3 weeks)

Google video

(All the clips on YouTube seem to be people playing it on Guitar Hero. Or, er, tennis players singing it.)

Anyway, I think this song confused me at the time, because I couldn't understand the words - even at the age of nine I still must have been grappling with the concept of foreign languages, because I was English. Presumably children in Switzerland or Wales get to grips with the idea a bit sooner. Funnily enough, even when I did figure out that they were real words, just not English ones, I never made any effort to find out what they meant, although I sometimes made up my own.

Anyway, where was I? The most striking thing about this record now, considering that it was recorded for a biopic of somebody who died in 1959, is how eighties it sounds. Not in the same way that Kajagoogoo sound eighties, obviously, but the way it's recorded is very 1987 to 21st-century ears. It's a complaint I often seem to find myself making when listening to this album, but it's a bit of a distraction and seems to come at the expense of any energy in the music. I wouldn't have said so in 1987, but I'd rather be listening to original fifties rock n roll.

Available on: Wolf Tracks: The Best of Los Lobos

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