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. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
In April 2017, Justin Bieber’s Purpose Tour came to Estadio El Campín in Bogotá, Colombia. At that point, the tour had been going for more than a year. The superstar was burned-out and miserable, and virtually every review noted how listless he looked onstage. Sometimes, he made the news by begging his audience not to scream, which is a novel tactic for a pop singer. A few months after the show in Colombia, Bieber would cancel the rest of the tour, citing mental health stuff. But while he was in Bogotá, Bieber went out to a nightclub, and he heard a song that captured his imagination.
The song in question was already on its way to global-smash status. Late in 2016, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, two middle-aged Puerto Rican veterans who came from different sides of the Latin pop universe, joined forces on “Despacito,” a hybrid beast of a love song that drew on both of their backgrounds. The song was warm and playful and sexy and instantly memorable, and it blew up across the Spanish-speaking world. When Bieber heard the track, it had been on top of the Billboard Hot Latin Songs chart for months, and it was already crossing over in the non-Spanish-speaking parts of Europe and the US. It was a global smash on the rise. Bieber heard the song and saw how the crowd reacted, and he wanted in.
That’s how Luis Fonsi tells the story, anyway. Maybe it really is that simple and organic. The official narrative is that Bieber wanted to sing on a “Despacito” remix, and he wanted it out immediately. The wheels of the music-business machine rumbled into motion, and Bieber was soon in a Colombian studio, with a Spanish-language coach leading him through the phonetic delivery of a language that he did not speak. Days later, Bieber’s version of “Despacito” was out in the world. Weeks later, it was the #1 song in America. And months after that, this new version of “Despacito” entered the history books, tying a decades-old record to become the longest-reigning chart-topper in Hot 100 history.
There are lots of different explanations for the “Despacito” phenomenon. There’s the rise of streaming services, which eliminated radio-programmer gatekeepers and allowed for endlessly stretched-out stays atop the Hot 100. There’s the growing Latino population in the US and the proliferation of different hybridized versions of reggaeton-infused Latin pop. There’s the white-hot starpower of peak Justin Bieber. All of those factors played important roles, and all of them were crucial into turning “Despacito” into the juggernaut that it became. Also, “Despacito” is a really good song, and Bieber’s inclusion, against all odds, might’ve made it even better. That matters, too.
When “Despacito” reached the top of the Hot 100, Luis Fonsi was 39 years old, and Daddy Yankee was 41. Both of them were pillars of the Spanish-speaking pop establishment with dozens of hits to their respective names, but they represented very different visions of that establishment. Fonsi was right in the middle of the road — the heartthrob balladeer who’d been a radio staple since the late ’90s but who’d never even sniffed the kind of crossover success that he achieved with “Despacito.”
Luis Alfonso Rodríguez López-Cepero was born in San Juan, but he didn’t stay there for long. (When Fonsi was born, the Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” was the #1 song in America. As far as I can tell, Puerto Rico didn’t have a chart of its own back then.) When Fonsi was a kid, his family moved to Orlando, and Fonsi fell in love with music. In high school, he sang in an acappella group called the Big Guys. Another Big Guy was Joey Fatone, who’s already been in this column as a member of *NSYNC, and he and Fonsi have been good friends ever since. Fonsi went to the University Of Florida on scholarship, studying music and singing in the college choir. He dropped out around the same time that he signed a deal with Universal Music Latin.
Fonsi’s 1998 debut single “Dime Como” is a treacly romantic ballad full of canned pianos and swelling harmonies. It wasn’t a big hit, only reaching #23 on the Hot Latin songs chart, but it pretty much established the blueprint for Fonsi’s career. For years and years, Fonsi cranked out one big ballad after another. His debut album Comenzaré sent more singles onto the Hot Latin Songs chart, and Fonsi landed at #1 for the first time with “Imagíname Sin Ti,” the lead single from his 2000 sophomore album Eterno.
In his early career, Luis Fonsi didn’t break out of Spanish-speaking markets in the US, but he became a star across Latin America. In 2000, he teamed up with Christina Aguilera, someone who’s been in this column a few times, to sing “Si No Te Hubiera Conocido,” a duet from her Spanish-language album Mi Reflejo, and he also sang for the Pope at a Jubilee 2000 concert. When Britney Spears toured Mexico in 2002, Fonsi opened. As Fonsi’s then-wife, the actress Adamari López, battled breast cancer, he dedicated his 2005 ballad “Nada Es Para Siempre” to her. The song became Fonsi’s first-ever Hot 100 hit, peaking at #90.
You’re not going to win a lot of critical plaudits by singing achingly overblown romantic ballads, but it’s a viable lane. Within that lane, Fonsi was very successful. In 2008, he made it back onto the Hot 100 with “No Me Doy Por Vencido,” which peaked at #92. That was one of a string of Hot Latin Songs chart-toppers, but Fonsi seemed to be past his peak by 2010, when he and Adamari López broke up. Fonsi’s 2014 album 8 didn’t spin off any huge hits, and he needed something special to return to the top of his lane.
In 2016, Fonsi woke up with a word in his head: “Despacito,” Spanish for “slowly.” Later that day, Fonsi had a songwriting session scheduled with the Panamanian-born singer and songwriter Erika Ender. He’d spent the morning turning “Despacito” into the beginnings of a song, figuring out ideas on his acoustic guitar and recording them on his phone. Ender caught on right away, and the two of them fleshed out “Despacito” until it was a gently horny seduction-song, one that could get engines revving without being aggressive enough to turn anyone off. The track went through something like five arrangements, and it really came together when it got a reggaeton beat from two Colombian producers, Andrés Torres and Mauricio “El Dandee” Rengifo.
Fonsi’s career took off around the same time that reggaeton took flight. Reggaeton essentially started off as a Spanish-language take on dancehall in late-’80s and early-’90s Panama, but the sound found its early home in Puerto Rico, where producers like DJ Playero turned it into an underground sensation. Luis Fonsi never had anything to do with anything underground, but he was in a different position in 2016, and so was reggaeton. Fonsi wanted to bring in another artist to give “Despacito” more edge. Originally, that artist was going to be the Massachusetts-born reggaeton MC Nicky Jam. (Nicky’s highest-charting Hot 100 hit, the 2018 J Balvin collab “X,” peaked at #41.) Nicky Jam recorded a version of “Despacito,” but its release would’ve conflicted with one of his albums, so it never came out. Instead, Fonsi went to Daddy Yankee, someone who’d been there from the earliest days of reggaeton in Puerto Rico.
Just like Luis Fonsi, Ramón Luis Ayala Rodríguez comes from San Juan. (When Daddy Yankee was born, the Ohio Players’ “Love Rollercoaster” was the #1 song in America.) Unlike Fonsi, Yankee didn’t move to Orlando as a kid. Instead, young Daddy Yankee grew up in housing projects, and he got seriously into baseball as a kid. When Yankee was nine, someone walked onto the field during one of his games and shot his coach dead, but that didn’t slow his enthusiasm. As a young man, Yankee tried out for the Seattle Mariners, but when he was back home in San Juan, he got hit in the hip by a stray AK-47 bullet, hospitalizing him and ending his baseball dreams. He had to change his focus in a hurry, and reggaeton was right there.
When he got shot, Daddy Yankee was already starting to appear on DJ Playero mixtapes; he made his debut on Playero’s 1992 track “So’ Persigueme, No Te Detengas.” The teenage Yankee released his Playero-produced debut album No Mercy in 1995, and he became enough of an underground sensation in Puerto Rico that he got Nas to appear on his 1998 track “The Profecy.” Yankee’s early music swerved between Jamaican dancehall and American rap, but when reggaeton developed into its own beast, driven by cheap synth sounds and the clomping dembow drum pattern, he evolved with it, developing a fired-up young-lion yammer. By the time he released his 2002 single “Latigazo,” Yankee’s style and persona were fully formed.
As reggaeton developed a huge fanbase in American cities like New York and Miami, Daddy Yankee went from underground phenomenon to something more visible. His 2004 single “Lo Que Pasó, Pasó” made it to #2 on the Hot Latin Songs chart, and he followed it up with the adrenalized anthem “Gasolina,” the song that really crystallized the whole idea of reggaeton in my mind. That song is incredible, and it took off on a mainstream level, crashing onto the Hot 100 and going all the way to #32. That same year, Yankee released his major-label debut Barrio Fino, which went platinum and became the decade’s biggest-selling Latin album. Yankee also had the most dramatic moment on NORE’s Spanglish posse cut “Oye Mi Canto,” which peaked at #12. The man was on fire.
I moved to New York in summer 2005, and I heard Daddy Yankee banging out of more windows than Jay-Z or 50 Cent. It was awesome. The guy had so much energy, and anytime he announced his presence — “Da! Dee! Yan! Kaaaay!” — my brain would snap to attention. I don’t speak any Spanish, but I was still one of the million Americans who bought Barrio Fino. Nothing after “Gasolina” matched the excitement of that moment, but Yankee kept cranking out hits, and he charted even higher when 2006’s also-pretty-great “Rompe” peaked at #24.
Yankee made occasional pop-crossover attempts, and those didn’t really work. He wasn’t going to suddenly find a new audience by adding a Fergie guest-verse to one of his tracks. But Yankee stuck around. He’d once existed in opposition to the Latin pop establishment, and he gradually became a part of it, a tale as old as time. Yankee and fellow reggaeton star Don Omar feuded over the imaginary King Of Reggaeton title, and then they buried their differences with a co-headlining tour. Reggaeton moved in different directions, with the genre’s center moving to Colombia and with offshoots like Latin trap coming up in Puerto Rico. But Yankee remained a presence on the Latin pop charts. The year before “Despacito,” his song “Shaky Shaky” made it onto the Hot 100, peaking at #88.
Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee recorded their parts of “Despacito” months apart. That’s the standard Frankenstein approach to big pop collaborations, but the end result in this case sounds surprisingly organic. If it was easier to combine reggaeton with romantic balladry, more people would do it. Somehow, “Despacito” walks the line beautifully, thanks in part to the “pacito, pacito” pre-chorus bit that Daddy Yankee added.
“Despacito” announces itself with a flamenco-style run played on a cuatro, Puerto Rico’s national instrument. It eases into a lush, hazy groove, alternating between Fonsi’s creamy croon and Yankee’s melodic bark. The reggaeton drums don’t arrive until the two vocalists hit the chorus together, the title landing in a gorgeous descending melody. When Fonsi sings, Yankee cheers him on. When Yankee raps, Fonsi coos in the background. There’s a great tension between the song’s two sides. Eventually, Fonsi sounds almost like he’s rapping, and Yankee almost sounds like he’s singing. The drums anchor the track as the melody pushes heavenward. It’s one of those rare moments of pop alchemy.
You don’t have to speak Spanish to understand “Despacito” on a fundamental level. I probably heard the song hundreds of times before looking up a lyrical translation while working on this column, and everything that Fonsi and Yankee say on the track is about what you’d expect. “Despacito” is a seduction, an invitation. It’s an extremely sexy song, but it’s not about sex, or at least it’s not crude about sex. Fonsi says that he wants to smell your neck slowly and whisper things in your ear. “I sign the walls of your labyrinth and make your whole body a manuscript” — that line would probably work just as well in English. Yankee says that your heart and his heart go bang-bang and that she’s looking for his bang-bang, which is about as raunchy as it gets. (Regular reggaeton gets way raunchier.) The best part of the song isn’t in the text; it’s the pause just before Fonsi sings the titular word, letting his intentions hang in the air.
Fonsi and Yankee filmed the “Despacito” video in Puerto Rico in December 2016, with former Miss Universe Zuleyka Rivera playing the love interest. It makes Puerto Rico look impossibly postcard-beautiful. The single came out in January, and it became an immediate sensation in much of the world. The video reached a billion views faster than any previous YouTube clip except for Adele’s “Hello” video, and the song reached #44 on the Hot 100 before Justin Bieber jumped on the remix. It would’ve gone higher without his help, too. The label was looking at other English-speaking artists for a remix, and Fonsi recorded his own English-language version, which he never released. Instead, the song got Bieber, and that supercharged it in the places on the planet where it wasn’t already supercharged, America included.
Considering all the forces massing behind the scenes, I don’t know if the “Despacito” remix was really as organic as everyone says, but I’d like to think that it was. In any case, it came together in a hurry. Fonsi, doing promo in Italy, got a middle-of-the-night phone call about Bieber wanting to sing on a remix. Manager Scooter Braun got Bieber’s vocal producer Josh Gudwin to jump on a plane to Bogotá. Bieber’s regular collaborator Poo Bear sent some lyrics, and Colombian musician Juan Felipe Samper coached Bieber through his pronunciation, giving him a half-hour crash-course in Spanish-language diction. Fonsi recorded a new verse of his own, with a few English lyrics from California songwriter Marty James.
On the “Despacito” remix, Bieber sings the first verse in English, and you can tell that the lyrics were written as quickly as possible: “You are my sunrise on the darkest day/ Got me feeling some kinda way.” But his delivery is exquisite. He sounds sincerely lovestruck, to the point of wounded-bird vulnerability, and his little R&B runs feel effortless. Bieber and Fonsi sing the chorus together. It’s a wordy, intricate piece of Spanish, and Bieber sings it beautifully — a real testament to Juan Felipe Samper’s effectiveness, since Bieber definitely speaks no Spanish. As someone who also speaks no Spanish, Bieber sounds awesome on that chorus. The remix stretches out the pause before the chorus, really letting that moment breathe, and it sounds so good when it comes in. Once again, this glued-together song achieves a magical weightlessness. It sounds like a true collaboration, not like something slowly assembled by a bunch of music-business professionals in different places at different times.
When the Bieber remix came out, “Despacito” shot straight into the top 10. Within a few weeks, it was #1. It succeeded DJ Khaled’s “I’m The One,” another song that features Bieber, which meant that Bieber essentially replaced himself at #1. In the months that followed, “Despacito” had an unchallenged run as the song of the summer, holding the top spot for an uninterrupted and nearly unprecedented 16-week stretch. It was the first primarily Spanish #1 hit on the Hot 100 since Los Del Rio’s “Macarena” more than two decades earlier. Unlike “Macarena,” there was no sense of novelty to the “Despacito” wave. It was just a banger, and there was something satisfying about seeing a Spanish song like that holding the #1 spot so soon after Donald Trump rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to the White House. There’s nothing remotely political about “Despacito,” and it would be a classic liberal mistake to read too much into that, but I liked seeing it happen at the time.
When any song spends too long at #1, it becomes too big and omnipresent for its own good. I usually turn against a song right around its sixth week at #1, and yet I continued to look at “Despacito” as a feelgood story. I never got sick of it. Maybe the difference was that “Despacito” never became a radio monster, though stations did play the song more after it became clear that it wasn’t going anywhere. “Despacito” held onto the #1 spot mostly through streaming, which meant that the people playing it mostly wanted to hear it. It was still shocking to see the song hold on long enough to tie the record that Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men set with “One Sweet Day” in 1995. If nothing else, “Despacito” is a much better song than “One Sweet Day.” I was pulling for it to break the record, but a returning superstar dropped an event single that kept that from happening. We’ll get to that soon enough.
Justin Bieber never made a video for the “Despacito” remix. When Bieber played a San Juan show in April, he brought out Fonsi and performed “Despacito,” but he must’ve been lip-syncing. A month later, Bieber did an impromptu set at the New York nightclub 1OAK, and he pretty much proved that he can’t sing the song. Bieber sang a bunch of badda-badda-ba nonsense syllables, and then he added, “I don’t know the words so I say, ‘Dorito.'” It looked like he was making fun of Spanish, which torched much of the goodwill that he earned by showing up on the remix in the first place. Fonsi tried to defend him, saying that the chorus is hard to sing even if you are a native Spanish singer. The attendant controversy didn’t hurt the commercial momentum of “Despacito,” and it didn’t really hurt Bieber, either. Bieber never attempted to perform the song again, and when Fonsi hit the late-night TV circuit to promote a song that didn’t need more promotion, he did it by himself.
“Despacito” wasn’t just huge in the US. It went crazy everywhere. In August 2017, the “Despacito” video — the one without Bieber — replaced Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s “See You Again” as the clip with the most views in YouTube history. The “Despacito” video kept that distinction for three years, and it’s still at #2 on the all-time list, behind current champ “Baby Shark.” As I write this, “Despacito” has 8.6 billion views. The current estimated global population is 8.2 billion. If every man, woman, and child on the planet just watched the “Despacito” video once, its numbers would be lower than they are right now.
The success of “Despacito” indicated that the US was a whole lot more open to Spanish-language pop music, and that has proven true. We haven’t seen another Spanish-language song ascend to the heights of “Despacito,” but we’ve seen lots and lots of Latin crossover hits. An important one came in the immediate wake of “Despacito” and attempted to replicate the formula. While “Despacito” was sitting on top of the Hot 100, Colombian superstar J Balvin and French producer Willy William released the hammering, energetic banger “Mi Gente,” which went all the way to #19 on its own strength. In September, around the time that “Despacito” finally fell from the #1 spot, Beyoncé showed up on a “Mi Gente” remix that was released as a hurricane-relief benefit, and the song surged to #3. (The Beyoncé “Mi Gente” remix is nowhere near as good as the original, but it’s still a 9. Beyoncé has been in this column a bunch of times, and she’ll be back. Balvin will eventually appear in this space, too.)
The “Despacito” single eventually went platinum 13 times over, but it didn’t exactly lead to tons more American hits for Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee. Fonsi remains a fixture in the Latin pop world. In 2019, he became one of the first coaches on La Vox, the Telemundo version of The Voice. But Fonsi has only been on the Hot 100 once since “Despacito.” “Échame La Culpa,” a Demi Lovato duet that Fonsi released later in 2017, peaked at #47. (Lovato’s highest-charting single, 2017’s “Sorry Not Sorry,” peaked at #6. It’s a 6.) “Despacito” didn’t even appear on an album until 2019, when Fonsi finally released Vida.
Daddy Yankee charted a few more times after “Despacito.” His sunny track “Dura” made it to #43 in 2018. In 2019, Yankee essentially remade “Informer” as a reggaeton track, with a Snow guest-verse and everything, and “Con Calma” reached #22. Yankee has charted more times with posse cuts and collaborations, too. About a year ago, Yankee wrapped up a retirement tour, but he’s released a couple more singles since, so this seems like one of those dubious show-business retirements. Still, Daddy Yankee can claim real legend status. The man paved the way for entire generations of reggaeton stars, including some who will eventually appear in this column.
“Despacito” was probably a one-off blockbuster for Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, at least as far as the US market is concerned. It’s also the biggest hit that Justin Bieber has ever been involved with, but it’s a bit tangential to Bieber’s overall superstardom, which didn’t end when “Despacito” finally dropped off the Hot 100. We’ll see Bieber in this column again.
GRADE: 9/10
BONUS BEATS: While “Despacito” was still sitting at #1 in 2017, Sesame Street aired its parody. Here’s Ernie singing “El Patito,” a song about his rubber ducky:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Compra el libro aquí.
