I was captured by clickbait! This clickbait particularly: Selena Quintanilla: el video publicado por Marco Antonio Solís donde se le ve junto a la cantante. If you don’t know Spanish, it basically translates as Marco Antonio Solís published a video where he is seen with Selena Quintanilla. That’s quite a loose translation, but I’m all about getting the quick sense of a phrase when reading. That’s how I became a fluent Spanish reader years ago, by the way. When I had to translate Sor Juana’s poetry for an honors dissertation later, I took more nuanced care, obviously. Academic work is not fluency work — remember that.
In my wildest dreams, I imagined the video was one in which they were singing together, but that was, alas, not to be. She is shown as the host of a music awards ceremony, one of which he won, and she proceeds to hand him his award. This is the sort of video that hardcore fans will collect and obsess over, especially since Solís put up a teaser before he posted the video. As the article states: Este hecho generó gran emoción entre los fanáticos de ambos famosos. This is a fairly easy translation for even non Spanish speakers, I think: This fact generated great emotion among fans of both stars.
It caused me to click on the link! Let me explain a little about these musicians. Selena is a legend. Most Americans have heard of her by this time; after all, J Lo played her in a blockbuster movie. More recently, Netflix has been making a Selena show, but it is really awful. Beautiful, voluptuous, brown-toned Selena, with her charm and stage presence, is played by a scrawny white Latina vegan who completely lacks stage presence. I only bring up the vegan part because the actress looks unusually skinny, which prompted me to look this up — as in, I guessed she was vegan by her physique. But this post is not about the show, which I do not like (it’s honestly just boring). This post is about things — or people, rather — that I like. Selena has a gorgeous voice and made all manner of interesting, catchy tunes, mixing in music from her and her siblings’ eighties’ childhoods with traditional cumbias and conjunto ballads. Although her brother was responsible for much of this innovative mixing, I’m sure she had some artistic input. And she certainly brought the songs to life with her singing and dancing.
While Selena was American, Marco Antonio Solís is a true-blue Mexican singer. For that reason, you might not have heard of him. He is also not a gen-Xer who was cut down in the prime of musicianship as Selena was; he is a boomer, which means he has decades’ worth of music out there. I don’t like all of it, as some verges on easy-listening. But his voice! Él canta como un angel. Yes, he sings like an angel with all the proper array of emotion and drama. I love him so much (as a musician, obviously)!
If you scroll all the way down in the article, you will see the video of the two singers together…not singing, much to my tristedad. I’ll let you figure that word out. Despite that it wasn’t my wildest dream, I’m sure it’s a great memory for Señor Solís. I’ll also leave you with a video of Solís singing…it’s hard to choose a song, though. He’s done everything from singer-songwriter with a guitar and/or keyboards to traditional mariachi and cumbia. Ah, well… I’ll go with a traditional mariachi because, you know, I love everything that is very Mexican:
No, I won’t be posting every day. In fact, I should be doing other work right now. But of all the things I like, these two musicians are somewhere near the top.
Jill Domschot 