An Open Letter to Ricky Martin

Dear Mr. Martin,

I just came back from the local taco joint, where Gary and I had dinner. Our seats were right in front of the jukebox, which was played at a volume high enough to vibrate all of my membranes, although not, I’m sorry to say, to pleasurable effect. I find the bass lines in mariachi music inexorably moronic, making me wish that the technology was such that I could at least speed up the rpm. I said to Gary that those bass lines reminded me of a man trying to walk through a desert with a bad leg, dragging his bad leg behind him as he pulled forward on the other.

Then a song came on that I found I liked a bit. It was in English, and sounded at the beginning like some weird kind of surf rock. What is this?, I wondered — is it from the 80s? and moments after telling Gary that I sort of liked it I recognized the chorus of “La Vida Loca.”

I have to say the chorus really ruined it for me. The surf-rock ambience of the first verse just got washed away in the struggle for the hook. But that was only the beginning of my disappointment. Never having heard the song so loudly or clearly before, I had been unaware that the line you penned to rhyme with “Living la vida loca” was “Her skin was the color of mocha.”

First of all, this line just doesn’t scan. Secondly, it fetishizes skin tone in a way that is simply not done in these days of willed color-blindness. The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” was really the last song to get away with doing that, and not even really successfully.

I am well aware that you were desperate for a rhyme, and that not many rhymes for “loca” can be found in English. May I suggest some alternatives?

If you wanted to continue to use “mocha” as your rhyme, you might say,

“Sipping a cup of mocha”

This would give the woman you are discussing (and whose choice of beverages you had already addressed earlier in the song, saying that she would never drink the water, but only French champagne) a kind of cozy, intellectual air that the other lyrics don’t really grant her.

Alternatively, you could play on the “inside outside in” section of the hook and have her,

“Sipping a cola-coca”

Clever, no? Or perhaps you’d rather stress her wild, lawless, superfreaky nature. Why not something like,

“Chewing a leaf of coca”

which would make her not only an intriguing user of recreational drugs but also someone who is in touch with the ethnic heritage with which you seem to want to bestow her.

My overarching question, though, Ricky, is this: why are you singing about this woman if you are gay? Or do you swing both ways? Is swinging both ways, in fact, the “vida loca” of which you sing?

Well, I hope I have been of help. If perchance in the future you think you might want to write a song whose lyrics not only scan but make beautiful webs of sense, too, please do not hesitate to contact me by clicking the link at left.

Yours sincerely,

Nada Gordon