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.
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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.”
Devilish Desire
“Livin’ La Vida Loca” (which translates as “Livin’ the Crazy Life”) is about a desirable woman who makes one’s nights memorable but also brings trouble.
“She’s into superstitions
Black cats and voodoo dolls
I feel a premonition
That girl’s gonna make me fall
She’s into new sensations
New kicks in the candlelight
She’s got a new addiction
For every day and night
She’ll make you take your clothes off and go dancing in the rain
She’ll make you live her crazy life, but she’ll take away your pain
Like a bullet to your brain
Come on!”
But there is a darker side to the tale when Martin sings: “Woke up in New York City in a funky cheap hotel/She took my heart, and she took my money/She must’ve slipped me a sleeping pill.”
The song is a fun, boisterous, cautionary tale. Be careful what you wish for…
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.
In speaking to Digital Spy in 2011, Martin looked back on the success of “Livin’ La Vida Loca”.
“Musically speaking it’s rich,” he said. “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 multicultural 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.”
(Photo by Randy Shropshire/Getty Images for GLAAD)
