Birthday Number 1s: 1999 - Livin' La Vida Loca

I don't really know what to write about

Livin' La Vida Loca - Ricky Martin

It's not that I haven't heard the song countless times, it's just that I am just not sure what I feel about it, if I feel anything.

It's certainly an archetypal summer Number 1 - they quite often have a bit of Spanish in them, as the Brits head off, or wish they were heading off, to a beach holiday. This trend went into overdrive in the summer of '99 - within the space of a couple of months, the Number 1s included Livin' La Vida Loca, Mi Chico Latino, Mambo No.5 and We're Going to Ibiza. As exotic as it gets!

I have suddenly a specific memory. I had just started listening to Nick Drake - I'd bought a Nick Drake compilation and the Nick Drake biography by Patrick Humphries - on the day of the eclipse, 11th August 1999, I was in a plane to Frankfurt. The sky was grey. I was reading about Nick Drake.

The era was classic end-of-history, everything is fine, only a few wars, nothing truly bad will ever happen again, let's all get ourselves in a tizz about the Millennium Bug.

Looking at the Number 1s for that year, there are a lot of them, and nearly all of them are of a type, a kind of frictionless pop/dance. There are some other decent ones, like Genie in a Bottle and, I suppose, Baby One More Time, but Livin' La Vida Loca may be the best of a fairly bad bunch.

I don't think I ever hated it. Maybe I did. Maybe it just wasn't enough like Nick Drake or Leonard Cohen for me.

But it's a great pop song ... I think ...a cultural touchstone ... maybe ... my sister had been in Mexico for a year so I already knew Ricky Martin was a megastar in the Latin world, and I think he'd had one or two brief encounters with the UK charts before this one. I like the way it combines England and Spanish in the same sentence. It hangs on "skin's the colour mocha" which is really bad, but just about survives. There was a tragic world champion boxer called Johnny Tapia with the craziest, saddest life story, whose nickname was "Mi vida loca" so it makes me think of him.

But, no, that's about it from me. A song that was both novelty and groundbreaker, one of the first of so many big Latin crossover hits, a song one couldn't escape from for a while, but not a source of much diversionary inspiration for me, I'm afraid.

Actually, spotting a typo a couple of days later, I have had a specific thought about this song, which I will refer back to  in a few songs' time, about how songs like this made me feel, compared to other people, and how, at this stage, I didn't really understand it, so ... I probably did resent this very good pop song at the time, because it was a song of romance and dancing, and by a few years' later, I just understood that feeling better in myself, and so wouldn't have hated something harmless and fun like this song, but still can't exactly bring myself to like it. Anyway, I'll come back to that thought.