Scott Mildenhall: There’s a particularly subtle employment of Pachelbel’s Canon Or Something That Sounds Like It in here, and it’s apt of a song too serene to say or do anything new. “Nota de Amor” doesn’t really reconcile its desire to be a soft ballad and an upbeat anthem simultaneously. Will Adams: By the song’s end, when it’s just honking like hot wind, it’s very easy to forget where it started: light percussion and reflective piano octaves. Katherine St Asaph: The sort of unabashed romanticism I imagine people hear in “Trap Queen” the sort of chords that are just unabashed. Jonathan Bogart: Loverman cliches mean a lot less when they’re delivered in what a hectoring tone if you can’t rap without bellowing, maybe don’t rap a ballad? I was all set to be charmed by the cumbia scratch until the reggaeton came in and drowned it out. Vives, in particular, sounds like he’s having so much fun here, singing a chorus so drenched in emotion: “I live in the moon for you, I fly without wings for you/there is no one who can take this note away from me.” Who doesn’t want someone who sings that, in his/her life? One of my favorite singles of 2015. “Nota de Amor” gives them each something (or in Wisin’s case, things) to do in service of a great song that they wrote jointly. And, well, you should certainly know by now that Daddy Yankee essentially started this reggaeton game (or at least popularized it on a wide scale), and is a damned fine rapper.
#Nota de amor full
Carlos Vives is a superb singer whose voice is full of joy. Thomas Inskeep: Wisin can rapid-fire spit lyrics, or sing them, with the same ease. One top decision is stuffing in the namechecks for whoever’s coming next into vanishingly small bits of space, giving a fun tag team carousel effect. Iain Mew: It has chords and a framework that I was fed up with a decade ago, but Wisin and Daddy Yankee bring such energy to it that it just about works. And as a woman, I can only answer to him: Why don’t you do it yourself? But they truly show that they aren’t experts in honest love songs if they were, they would have noticed how pathetic a line like “cook the paella/open the bottle” sounds. But the rest of the lyrics could fit any melodramatic love ballad of the type so famous and stereotypical of Latin American culture. The most sexual images are “I bet you don’t dare to do with me all the things that you say you shouldn’t do” (in which actually sex is just implicit and makes the woman look like a saint) and Wisin mentioning that the underwear of his beloved is yellow.
The lyrics are exactly the opposite of the themes that reggaeton often covers.
Given that Daddy Yankee and Wisin are two of the most relevant and iconic figures of the scene, “Nota de Amor” kind of seems a defense from these criticisms. Juana Giaimo: I recently saw on the news that an aggrupation in Colombia made a campaign against the extremely violent lyrics against women in reggaeton. Pharrell WilliamsĪnd now, a song for all of us who are wearing yellow underwear.
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