Ricky Martin had everything a record-label exec could possibly want.
Thalía’s only Hot 100 hit, the 2003 Fat Joe collab “I Want You,” peaked at #22.)įor Mottola’s strategy to pay off, he needed to open things up with the right performer and the right song. 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. Mottola found ways to push his artists, using their ethnicities as a marketing hook. 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. But a lot of those stars did have one big thing in common: They were signed to the various different subsidiaries of Sony Music. Most of them were just making straight-up English-language pop music with occasional nods to the performers’ different heritages. The Latinx artists who blew up and made hits in 1999 came from vastly different places and circumstances. It’s a web of different sounds - some connected to one another, some not - that really only have a language in common. 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 was a marketing strategy that worked well enough to evolve into a cultural phenomenon. The Latin pop explosion of 1999 was a fake thing that became real. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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